Ted asks a question which I think has obvious answers, but which I’ll open to group discussion:
“What would be the purpose of a Universal global language? To communicate what?”
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4 Comments
I’m working on something large that sort of answers both what would be communicated, as well as why a universal language is almost a given at this point in history…
Hoping to have the bulk of it done by Sunday evening.
Can you give us a summary?
Ask a mathematician, if you can find one. There’s a sense in which math[s] can be understood as a ‘universal language’, that it has a kind of existence independent of people. When the aliens come, they might not speak English, but they’ll know that 2+2=4 and that 7 is a prime.
Turing’s work [as always!] is interesting here. He proved that you can show that any computer (understood as a stepwise, rule-based, symbol-manipulating machine) can always be emulated by any other. There’s really only one computer language (though it might not seem like it these days). And it gets better: if the brain is a computer, then it can be emulated by a computer and artificial intelligence is a certainty. Perhaps surprisingly, that hasn’t been proved yet. But if the brain ain’t a computer, /no-one knows what it is/. Except maybe Roger Penrose and some of the quantum computation guys.
Von Neumann also springs to mind: *’If you can say exactly what it is that a computer cannot do, I can always make a computer that can do exactly that!’*
Ask and you shall receive, knock and the door will be opened.
Just give me some time to get it all the way opened; it’s a damn heavy door…